Benjamin Barrett | Through the Shattered Lens

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Saturdays, I will be reviewing the Canadian sitcom, Check it Out, which ran in syndication from 1985 to 1988. The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi!

This week, Edna has a good idea.

Episode 2.15 “Tots ‘R’ Us”

(DIr by J. Sumner, originally aired on February 1st, 1987)

I have no idea who J. Sumner was.

J. Sumner is credited as being the director of this episode. (Up until this episode, Alan Erlich was the show’s regular director.) I’ve never seen the name before and it struck me as being such an odd name to use that I actually looked the director up on the IMDb. According to the IMDb, this episode of Check It Out! is the only thing that J. Sumner has ever been credited as having been involved with. That’s quite an accomplishment, making your entertainment career debut as a director Most people have to work up to it.

I kind of suspect that J. Sumner is a pseudonym of some sort. Maybe the real director didn’t want to be credited for this episode, though there’s nothing about it that’s really all that different from any other episode of Check It Out. It’s not a terrible episode but it’s also not a particularly interesting one, which is why I’m wasting so much time speculating about the identity of J. Sumner.

The episode takes place on Canadian Mother’s Day. Edna decides to turn the back offices into a daycare so mothers can leave their children while they shop. That actually does sound like a good idea to me. Whenever I go grocery shopping, I always seem to get stuck in line behind people who have multiple hyperactive children. Just last week, this little brat stepped on my foot while running around the store and his mother didn’t even apologize to me. Seriously, I was limping for hours afterwards! I should have called the cops and pressed charges….

Anyway, all of the moms and their kids eventually leave. Except there’s one child (played by Benjamin Barrett) left behind. He wears a nametag that reads “Orphan” but a call to the local orphanage reveals that no one is missing. Edna calls the police but tells them that the store will take care of the kid and hold onto him until his parents arrive. The police apparently say, “Okay, thanks for letting us know,” and then never bother to come out to the store. That doesn’t sound like typical police procedure when it comes to an abandoned child but who knows? This is a Canadian show so maybe that’s the way they do it in Manitoba.

Edna pressures Howard into using a sock puppet to talk to the kid. The previously silent kid is happy to talk to Goober The Sock. The kid’s name is Freddy. He stays overnight at the store with Edna and, in a really sad scene, Edna asks Freddy if he knows anything about adoption. Edna’s dreams of taking Feddy into her home are ruined when Freddy’s father (Walker Boone) shows up. Howard gives Freddy and his father tickets to a baseball game. Awww, that was nice!

This was a pretty simple episode and, to be honest, it was kind of boring. Howard and Edna are more fun when they’re weird than when they’re nice. As always, Gordon Clapp (as Viker, the electrician) got a few funny lines and made the most of his limited screentime. Otherwise, this was a sweet-natured but not particularly enthralling episode.

And if J. Sumner is reading this, say hi in the comments! We’d love to hear from you!

(Lisa is currently in the process of trying to clean out her DVR by watching and reviewing all 40 of the movies that she recorded from the start of March to the end of June. She’s trying to get it all done by the end of July 11th! Will she make it!? Keep visiting the site to find out!)

The next film on my DVR was The Night Stalker. Though I recorded the film off of Lifetime on June 12th, the film actually made its premiere 8 days earlier when it played at the Seattle International Film Festival.

The Night Stalker tells a story about the real-life serial killer Richard Ramirez. Ramirez was a drifter and a self-declared Satanist who, in the 1980s, went on a murder spree in Los Angeles and San Francisco. He was eventually captured, not by the police but by a group of citizens who saw his picture in a newspaper. Ramirez spent the rest of his life of California’s death row, where he died in 2013. Despite spending the majority of his life condemned to death, Ramirez was never executed. Instead, he died of lymphoma.

Of the thousands of serial killers who have haunted America’s nightmares over the past few decades, Ramirez was infamous for both the savagery of his crimes and the fact that he never showed any remorse. The famous footage of him smirking in the courtroom and shouting, “Hail Satan!” has shown up in a countless number of “World’s Most Evil” cable documentaries. Ramirez is also infamous for being better-looking than the average serial killer. From the minute he was arrested to the day of his eventual death, Ramirez had admirers and groupies.

It’s a disturbing story and, for the most part, The Night Stalker does it justice, using Ramirez to tell an intense story about a man without a soul. This is a seriously dark and disturbing little movies, with the scenes of Ramirez’s abusive childhood and subsequent crimes achieving a nightmarish intensity in a way that you would rarely expect to see on Lifetime.

The film itself deals with a lawyer named Kit (played by Bellamy Young) who interviews Ramirez (Lou Diamond Phillips) during the final days of his life. Kit is hoping that she can get Ramirez to confess to committing a murder in Texas and help to get a condemned man off of death row. However, Kit has another reason for wanting to talk to Ramirez. She was a teenager (played, in flashbacks by Chelle Sherrill) during Ramirez’s crime spree. (The young Ramirez is played by Benjamin Barrett.) While Ramirez was murdering the people in her neighborhood, Kit was dealing with her abusive stepfather and her passive mother. As a result of her childhood, Kit is impulsive and often self-destructive and she hopes that by understanding Ramirez, she can maybe somehow understand how own childhood.

(In many ways, Kit stands in for many of the women who, for various reasons, became obsessed with Ramirez after his arrest and imprisonment.)

As for Ramirez — well, he’s a manipulative asshole. That’s actually the best that you can say about him. The film portrays the details of Ramirez’s own abusive childhood but, to its credit, the film never tries to turn Ramirez into a sympathetic character. The performances of Lou Diamond Phillips and Benjamin Barrett both come together to create a chilling portrait of a man who is literally empty on the inside.

It’s not a perfect film, by any means. The scenes set in Texas feature a few notably dodgy accents and, occasionally, the film comes close to turning into a Silence of the Lambs rip-off. But, for the part, this is a thoroughly disturbing and, at times, frightening portrait of life at its worse. The Night Stalker is a deeply creepy portrait of an all too real evil. Watch it but be aware that it may lead to nightmares.